Eileen Myles on Gram Parsons

This Eileen Myles piece on Gram Parsons is a nice way to start the day, particularly a chilly, soon-to-be-snowy Tuesday. Parsons, whose music is embedded throughout the essay (in mp3s), is a warming element—twangy and heartfelt—and Myles is affectionate, and also leads with the heart. She came to Parsons years after a precocious friend had anointed him the perfect conflation of cuteness and musical talent. Myles eventually agreed, and clearly still thinks so. And who wouldn’t.

She says, of her “handsome geek” and his sad, untimely death:

You sort of get only one shot this way (better be good) and it’s effective to think of Parsons’ influence and death as fertilizing a tradition rather than occupying it as one of its majors stars. It reminds me of a story I heard in Estonia about the dead king sleeping underground and fertilizing his own land, literally. Gram Parsons gave a lot of other bands a leg up and was on his own way down as they crested. Or maybe he was getting a little better or a lot better for a moment and was starting to collaborate with Emmylou Harris when he overdosed though in the tragic narrative of drugs and alcohol he died because he had become healthy and then he turned back. Something in a person must want that early death. It’s like oh I forgot my glasses but it’s my life.

I’m a new initiate to Coldfront’s “Poets off Poetry” section, where the Myles lives, and I like it. Myles’s writing here is plain, friendly, and about her love. And here, in contrast, is a piece by Daniel Nester, on “Your Love” by the nineteen-eighties pop band The Outfield.